Analysis the Development of Cities of Yazd Province From View Point to Combat Desertification by TOPSIS Models

Desertification is a global problem and most of the arid and semi-arid countries including Iran faced this problem. Desertification has many limitations in terms of agriculture, food security, livestock raising, industry development and service costs. This phenomenon is a process that gradually developed, intensified and the cost of its reclamation increased exponentially. There for, substantial and balanced development of desertification activities is necessary for achieving success in controlling and reducing the effects of this phenomenon in different regions. Hence, determining and analysing the present condition of desertification in different areas is the first step in the prosses of regional sustainable development and the basis of budgeting policy, human resources and so on. On the other hand, due to the weakness of traditional methods of measuring performance, it is necessary to provide new and quantitative methods. In this study, in order to analyze the development of the regions from desertification perspective, the weights of indices were estimated using Shannon entropy model. The development rate of the units was determined using TOPSIS model. The ontained results showed that Ardakan and Bafg cities are very developed with the relative closeness of 0.5250 and 0.5124 from the ideal desertification solution, respectively. But Yazd, Taft and Mehriz cities are very poor with the relative closeness of zero from the ideal solution. Based on our results we suggeste that the obtained results and ranking should be considered in the process of budgeting and planning for the future development of cities in terms of desertification.